And CGI served as a non-threatening, open-handed collaborative that stood squarely in the mainstream center of the political spectrum – but clearly to the left of the White House.

This year, when the current occupant of the White House praised Bill Clinton as the nation’s “Do-Gooder in Chief,” there was more than a little irony in the worlds of President Barack Obama. Because in its seventh annual confab this past week in midtown Manhattan, Obama’s Democratic predecessor once more had assembled the kind of open, ordered collaborative the President might well wish Washington more resembled.

And both CGI and its energetic founder still stood squarely in the mainstream center of the political spectrum – but clearly to the left of the White House.

This was my sixth CGI annual meeting (I also spoke at CGI University in Miami last spring) and it has been fascinating to watch the organization’s evolution. Then too, this is Bill Clinton’s 10th year working on his post-Presidential philanthropy and development projects. The numbers continue to be big: CGI has garnered more than 2,100 commitments worth nearly $70 billion. But it’s clear to me that Clinton’s own thinking has evolved, and that he still gestates new ideas on the “art of the possible” during these annual meetings and his year-round work with CGI and his foundation.

And it’s not so much driven by philosophy or ideology (indeed, Clinton’s ideas of government’s role in the world seem remarkably intact) as much as by necessity – and the challenge of these deeply threatening economic times.

“There are challenges that we all face and we have to face them together,” said President Clinton at one of the plenary sessions. “You should feel good about being part of the non-governmental movement, but I do not think you should be anti-government.”

There was a subtle shift in CGI this year that fit in under the focus headline of “jobs” that displayed a keen sense of the present. President Clinton was talking quite a bit about his upcoming book on creating jobs. The main stage “commitments” (those promises of projects, collaboration, and funding that define CGI’s operations) feature the former President and the usual range of celebrities, heads of state, big corporations, nonprofit leaders and assorted do-gooders. I’m not sure if this was commented on elsewhere, but I found the scarcity of big financial institutions both onstage and in general evidence at CGI this year to be somewhat telling. There was stronger emphasis on companies that make things, and on projects involving retrofitting vast portions of the economy (energy efficient real estate deals were the big-ticket headline of the meeting, in my view), and interesting, on labor.

One of the signature commitments came from the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers to fund energy-effecient infrastructure in cities. The initiative led Reuters’ coverage and signaled Clinton’s widening of CGI in the last two years to focus more on serious domestic issues:

With the United States possibly on the brink of another recession and the unemployment rate at more than 9 percent, Clinton trumpeted a pledge by the AFL-CIO labor federation and the American Federation of Teachers to reinvest $10 billion over the next five years in energy-efficient infrastructure.

“This is a huge deal. This could be done not just in the United States but in every European country, in every wealthy Asian country. This system will work and you get guaranteed savings,” Clinton told attendees during the opening session.

The unions have worked with state treasurers and pension funds associated with labor to make the green investments. For example, two of the largest U.S. public pension funds, California’s CalPERS and CalSTERS, have allocated over $1.1 billion to the effort.

In a small backstage gathering of bloggers on CGI’s final day, President Clinton popped open a Diet Coke and held forth of a wide range of current events that – in total – put him (gently) to the left of Obama Administration – or perhaps more accurately, a bit more plainspoken than a sitting President can be on pressing issues. The former President poured blame on the government Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for holding up the Palestinian peace process (earning the enmity of neo-conservatives like Elliot Abrams in the process), chastised the international community for not making good on its pledges to rebuild Haiti, urged a liberalization of U.S. policy on refugee settlement (“keeping people in long-term limbo is a waste of human potential”), talked about food security in the developing world, and blasted climate change denial.

He also spoke in strong, tough terms about U.S. immigration policy: “America needs to become more open to immigration again,” he told the group. “We simply need to be more pro-immigrant. I don’t think it’s particularly threatening to jobs.”

Peeking briefly into national U.S. politics, President Clinton criticized what he called “the non-fact-based political debate,” arguing that the he said, she said “horse-race” style of national political reporting means “nobody rings the bell if the facts are wrong. There’s no bell ringing, and that means there’s a huge disconnect not just in the message, but in the method.”

It’s a point that wasn’t lost when President Obama pushed his jobs bill in his CGI speech in the main hall – nor when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was interviewed by Chelsea Clinton, who clearly has a public life on the agenda. “I would make a plea for more people with knowledge,” said Secretary Clinton, “to not stand on the sidelines and shrug or throw a shoe at the TV when political discussions take place, but to try to participate, play a productive role.”

The sidelines will clearly not include her husband during the nascent political season. It was no accident in my mind that President Obama hit the golf course with President Clinton in Washington after CGI closed. Facing a re-election fight during difficult economic times of high unemployment coupled with general dissatisfaction over the direction of the country.

Obama was clearly in recruiting mode. With his popular Secretary of State out of action for active campaigning, there is no more valuable surrogate for next year’s election than her husband – who so clearly brought domestic issues to the fore at his annual CGI confab, and placed himself – with a grin, and a pat on the back on the stage at the Sheraton last week – just to the left of the White House.

I’m here in the media bunker of the old Sheraton on Seventh Avenue, plugged into the sixth annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting – my fifth, as it turns out. Here’s what I just told a reporter from a major financial newswire about what CGI is in a single sentence: “it’s an investment banking service – old style – for causes and philanthropy.” And that’s exactly what CGI is. Bill Clinton uses his considerable political capital – and the platform that comes from being an energetic, globe-trotting former president who just happens to be married to the current Secretary of State – to work with foundations, nonprofits, corporations and no small number of stars and celebrities to make deals for the public good.

The annual meeting here in New York, timed to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, gets most of the attention – look, there’s Ashton and Demi chatting with Muhammad Yunus! – but CGI has grown into a year-round operation. This past spring, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking on social media at the CGI University gathering at the University of Miami, which evoked an entirely different vibe than the pin-striped, star-studded affair each September. In Miami, 1,800 college and university students came together to work on projects of social entrepreneurship and charity – they were energetic, entirely un-jaded, and incredibly inquisitive. For them, CGI wasn’t a platform for making major corporate commitments – it was a place to learn from their peers and gain professional assistance for projects they believe will change the world.

Last night, I took part in a meeting of about 15 bloggers and writers with President Clinton here at the Sheraton. He spoke about the chances for Mid-East peace (he’s bullish), the importance of encouraging development centered around women and girls (a central theme at CGI), and how this year’s meeting will focus more on domestic issues than in the past because of the pain of the American recession. As always, Clinton powered an intellectual and wonkish whirlwind, jumping from the Tea Party to politics in Rwanda with ease, and evincing the kind of  detailed knowledge of, for example, Israeli political parties that most Americans don’t have about Democrats and Republicans.

It brought to mind the “wired” part of CauseWired’s mission to me – not the technology, not the social networks, not the actual wires and routers and signals of the digital revolution. It’s being personally wired, building a real network of people who can meet anywhere (in person or online) to support causes and encourage social change. It’s the kind of “wired” you need for a successful capital campaign or social project. CGI does that at the highest level. That’s why I’ll spend three days here listening and meeting and writing. You can follow some of the action over at onPhilanthropy.com, where Susan Carey Dempsey and I are covering the big themes at CGI. Or listen in on the livestream of CGI here.

Putting the imperative issue of civil rights and justice around the world for women and children front and center at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative required intense coordination between CGI and the Obama Administration – starting of course with the world’s foremost power couple.

But it also relied on some special sauce that was both unpredictable and incredibly effective: the distribution, discussion and amplification of social media.

This year’s CGI, which brought together more than 1,200 movers and shakers in New York in the cause of social change and international development, became a virtual boombox empowering women…and it’s a two part-story that reaches from the motorcades and presidential suites to digital alleyways of Twitter and blogland.

First, the top-down power messaging.

Fighting abuse and human trafficking of women and children is the signature issue for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared in her closing address: “we will put women at the heart of our efforts.”

Her husband, former President Clinton put the theme out front on the meeting’s first day: “Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property. Whether the issue is improving education in the developing world, or fighting global climate change, or addressing nearly any other challenge we face, empowering women is a critical part of the equation.”

And President Obama tied the work of his late mother in microfinance to the “spirit of the Clinton Global Initiative” and work empowering women and assisting children. His Administration was omnipresent at CGI, which coincides each year with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Besides Secretary Clinton, speakers included Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, economic adviser Larry Summers, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

One of the highlights was a peppery panel the first day, hosted by Diane Sawyer of ABC News, featuring Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International, and Edna Adan, director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital in East Africa, along with the head of the World Bank and CEOs of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. And the panel brought about one electrifing moment: when Salbi challenged ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s statement that funding isn’t the problem – a fairly typical assertion these days. Retorted Salbi, whose organization provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

You sensed some “shareholder value” vs. “humanity’s needs” tension on the panel, and indeed throughout this year’s CGI – where perhaps the corporate titans are taken for the infallible gurus of finance they were before the recession. Blogger Emily Davila at beyondprofit captured the panel’s vibe, the classic CGI combination of corporate powerhouses with practitioners:

On one hand, the unprecedented high-level private sector participation means that the women’s agenda has gone mainstream; real change will not happen if only women are talking to each other. On the other hand, the panel would not have succeeded if it hadn’t had two women from the trenches who could keep the discussion grounded in the life and death realities many women face.

Those life and death realities were emphasized in a news conference with Secretary Solis, who vowed that the Labor Department would pursue companies with slave labor in their supply chains, and Ambassador Verveer, who said that “modern-day slavery is a global scourge – no country is immune.”

Verveer and Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who monitors human trafficking or the Obama Administration, clearly positioned the State Department as a new activist player on the issue. Indeed, Verveer wondered aloud if civil rights for women around the world hadn’t reached a “tipping point.”

If it has, the combination of star power on display at CGI and the bottom-up effect of social networking are playing complementary roles to U.S. government policy – a rare moment when an administration’s policy is in near-total sync with NGO and grassroots activists.

Star power also played a role. Film star Julia Ormond, who founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking at CGI two years ago, said that “meeting with victims and hearing their story just seals the deal.” And singer Ricky Martin made it personal – and advanced the storyline – during a shutter-clcking appearance in a special session, well-captured by Ari Melber in his Nation blog:

When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton’s 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.

“I feel that my heart is going to come out of my mouth,” he said, recounting his sadness for the “millions of children that didn’t make it.” Martin was followed by testimony from a woman who, along with her two children, was kidnapped and held for four years of forced labor.

Martin made his remarks in what an interesting venue for Twitter reach. His own tweets – “on the CGI it’ll b my honor 2 present heroes tht r doing gr8 thinx agnst human trffckng.will xchange ideas n learn what else needs 2 b done!” – reached more than 338,000 followers.

But the Twitter king – actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) – was also making the CGI scene with his wife, Demi Moore (@mrskutcher); he has a Twitter-leading 3.6 million followers, whilst she pitches short messages to 2.1 million more. The couple tweeted their commitment:

Hubby & I have started The Demi and Ashton Foundation or The DNA Foundation as we like 2 call it. We’re ready 2 help bring an end 2 slavery

And Kutcher sent his followers to the live CGI video stream for the plenary on human trafficking. He also found time to tweak a more senior delegate to the meeting:

Listening to John Glenn mock the social web because he doesn’t understand it. I wonder if people mocked his space program.

Meanwhile, Moore introduced her followers to the nation’s leading journalistic voice on the issue:

Sitting in listening 2 a panel speak on investing in Women & Girls at CGI. In Nick Kristoff’s words Women are the solution not the problem!

Celebrity tweets clearly go to a rather broad audience, but I think they help to reinforce a potential cultural shift in how we view sex trafficking and women’s civil rights. Repetition from the likes of an A-list TMZ-type couple can puncture the social permafrost around a difficult issue like this, and deliver it to the mainstream.

Besides, there’s a core audience for information from CGI that is not celebrity-obsessed: writers, analysts and bloggers who work in and around the “social sector” year-round. To a large degree, they carry a lot of the heavy baggage for CGI in terms of disseminating and discussing ideas and innovation with a wider audience.

It’s this group that sent a couple of dozen correspondents (including me and my CauseWired partner Susan Carey Dempsey) into the chaotic and tightly-controlled CGI press pool – a large-scale operation that is understandably focused primarily on the video and still cameras, there to capture the bigshots and stars. And it’s this group that now uses blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to spread some of the bigger thoughts and developments to an activist group beyond the (occasionally oppressive) Sheraton press room. And you could see a the big theme of women and girls sprouting everywhere you looked.

For instance, tweets with both the #cgi09 hashtag and “girls” appeared more than 200 times over the last week, #cgi09 and “women” was tweeted more than 450 times, and #cg09i and trafficking more than150 times. This doesn’t include the celebrities, who tend to use Twitter more as a broadcast medium and don’t tend to use the hashtags to organize the conversation.

Relatively small numbers – #cgi09 never “trended” into the top ten of Twitter tags – yet the audience for international development and human rights was paying attention around the virtual network. And that’s important for an issue that’s just arriving at its moment, getting its wider organizing chops together under a new Administration with an activist State Department.

That’s important to an undertaking like CGI, I think. Despite its success and the billions committed to helping people around the world, building a network to carry its causes onward – even at smaller scale – is crucial to getting beyond the limitations of one organization, however large and high-powered. Upwards of 30,000 people watched the proceedings via the live stream, which CGI made available this year as a widget anyone could use on their own sites to carry the proceedings.

It isn’t about making the power brokers haul out their iPhones and tweet from the inner circle. As Bill Clinton said in his summation: “Twitter. That’s a funny word.” But he still got the importance of distributing the discussion; he said CGI generated 80 tweets per hour, and that the social network – inside and outside the hall – is heling to power the bottom of the innovation pyramid.

Chat Catcher

Kicking off this fifth annual gathering with a speech that publicly cemented his growing partnership with Bill Clinton – the husband of his former political rival – the President stressed his community organizing experience and the non-governmental work of his late mother.

“My mother understood that whether you live in the foothills of Java or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we all share common principles:  justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” said the President. “And we all share common aspirations, for ourselves and our children:  to get an education, to work with dignity, and to live in peace and security.”

That meshed well with Clinton’s remarks while waiting the Obama motorcade to wind its way through a gridlocked midtown: the President was the first to come into office with experience nonprofit experience “and that’s a very good thing.”

President Obama praised the CGI attendees and took note of the gathering’s five-year record of achievement, including its 1,400 commitments affecting the lives of 200 million people around the world.

“That’s how we’ll confront the challenges of our time,” he said. “Standing together, working together, building together… That’s the spirit that I see here tonight — the spirit that says we can rise above the barriers that too often divide us.”

The President began his remarks on a light note, razzing President Clinton on his golf score an about monopolizing his wife’s schedule. “I’ve always appreciated President Clinton’s valuable advice and the ideas he’s offered my administration.  I do understand that the President has been having trouble getting a hold of my Secretary of State lately.  (Laughter.)   But I hope he doesn’t mind, because Hillary Clinton is doing an outstanding job for this nation and we are so proud of her.”

Then he praised the former President choice to found CGI. After leaving office, said Obama, Clinton asked, “What can I do to keep making a difference?”And what an extraordinary difference he, working with all of you, have made.  For the victims of disaster, from the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina, he’s made a difference.  For those in need, from parents and children battling HIV/AIDS to your efforts today on behalf of the people of Haiti, he’s made a difference. It’s no exaggeration:  Around the world, Bill Clinton has helped to improve — and save — the lives of millions.  That is no exaggeration.”

And CGI, said the President, is increasingly important in an interconnected world. “We need a new spirit of global partnership,” the president said. “That is the spirit that guides this organization. I hope that is the spirit that guides my administration.”

Here at the Sheraton, security is as tight as the bedsheets in the presidential suite upstairs – President Barack Obama is due this afternoon to help kick off the 5th annual Clinton Global Initiative, the massive who’s who gathering of heads of state, movie stars, philanthropists and corporate titans (if any can be said to exist in 2009).

Yet the word here in the blogger and media bunker a couple of floors below the CEOs and Nobel types is that Bill Clinton’s dizzying annual confab of development and do-gooderism is more “open” than before.

Oh, not in the most obvious ways: you generally still have to be somebody of serious accomplishment or pony up for a large-scale commitment to the developing world or domestic poverty to get a delegate’s badge. At CGI, Brad Pitt’s the leading voice on New Orleans. And that’s no accident – star power drives this show, which is all about bringing attention to the world’s problems. That is succeeds wildly nearly nine years after President Clinton left office is testament to both his contacts and continued energy – and to the people who make this thing run. Super Bowls have fewer moving parts.

So yes, it’s very much a top-down affair from a messaging standpoint. What President Obama says, what Bill Clinton highlights, what Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ashton Kutcher promote, what Al Gore,  Queen Rania and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comment upon – those items will drive the headlines and the video spots on cable TV.

Yet that summation would ignore a trend that’s as plain as the code on the CGI webcast of the sessions: a Twitter app that allows anyone to ask questions of the participants. It’s a small foot in the door, I think, for a conference that ranks with Davos in high octane policy-making and is unsurpassed in attendance by heads of state from around the world.

This year, you also sense that the Tweetstream – and its ubiquitous #cgi09 tag – isn’t limited to a handful of symbolic tweets from the movie stars and the constant updates from bloggers; many of the delegates are posting as well from their iPhones and Blackberries. Then too, bloggers are now allowed access to some of the smaller speciality sessions – like ‘The Infrastructure of Human Dignity: Protecting the Most Vulnerable’ on Thursday – that we used to have to watch closed-circuit television to listen in on. And last night, President Clinton hosted another late-night roundtable with bloggers; I couldn’t make it this year, but was at last year’s and it’s generally a free-wheeling session on an incredible variety of serious policy topics. This year’s CGI is also streaming video outside the Sheraton more completely than in year’s past – an overt attempt to carry the conversation beyond the hotel walls.

This will never be Bar Camp or Netroots Nation. It’s not exactly the barbarian’s storming the gates, either. Yet despite the wall of hard-nosed security on the way in, CGI is opening up. And given the importance of this gathering to social entrepreneurship and international development, that opening may encourage more bottom-up involvement.